James Waldo

Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science, Chief Technology Officer, Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Jim Waldo is the Chief Technology Officer for the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he is also a Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science, teaching courses in distributed systems and privacy. He also teaches technology policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Jim has designed clouds at VMware, and was a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he investigated next-generation large-scale distributed systems. His last project at Sun Labs was Darkstar. Prior to (re)joining Sun Labs, he was the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java. Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text and internationalization. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first OMG CORBA specification. He is currently a member of the editorial boards of Queue magazine and the Communication of the ACM. He also holds over 50 patents. Jim received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He also holds M.A. degrees in both linguistics and philosophy from the University of Utah.